Panther began to pace in an ever widening circle, laying out, in his own language, his case for payment, logical as any barrister before the bench. When he passed close to Severin, he was holding the grim trophy at his side, copper locks dangling to the ground and trailing through the ashes and dirt.
No. Not copper. Red. Redder than Jenny’s hair, and longer. He could see that now, up close. Almost too much to dare to hope. The hair was not hers.
Panther was still circling the yard when Lieutenant Jones entered the fort.
It took him a moment to make sense of the bizarre scene: the outraged warrior, the silent onlookers, the bedraggled and bloody scalp with the long red hair.
Her hair is redder than Miss Leighton’s, but they are of an age and in all other respects might be taken for sisters.
Jones fell to his knees when he recognized the scalp and his wails of grief drowned out even the monologue of the outraged Panther.
A company of loyalists from Pennsylvania decamped that night. By the time the girl’s body was found in the woods and brought into camp the next day, several hundred more American loyalists had deserted. Severin, still chained to his post, did not doubt that a good number of them had gone over to the Continentals. It was the sort of story that did not need an engraving by Revere or a pamphlet by Paine to carry it, and it would attract more Rebel enlistments than any recruiting broadside.
Severin felt a little relief to know that Jenny was still free somewhere, and more when he overheard Burgoyne’s junior officers insisting that he recall his Indian scouts and put an end to the search for the girl. His advisers urged him, in hushed, worried voices, to hang Panther, swiftly, or risk further desertions.
It was good advice, all of it, but Burgoyne refused to punish one of his “children” who had simply misunderstood his instructions. Severin could have told them that it didn’t matter anyway. The real damage was already done. The discontent and disillusionment percolating through the camp would travel, along with the story of the murder of Jane McCrea.
* * *
Jenny did not know whether she was a prisoner or a guest of the party of Mohawks who had captured her until they reached the village where Severin had grown up, where she was given food and water and was fussed over as though she were in her mother’s parlor in New Brunswick.
The neatly tended fields and imposing longhouses were filled entirely with women and children and the very elderly, who wanted her to eat and drink and were happy to give her Kanonsase’s direction if she was really going to bring him news of Kanonsase’s son.
The man sometimes called Ashur Rice, who had lived among the English and adopted some of their ways—indeed, as had the village women who cooked in English pots and wore English cloth and sewed English beads onto their hides—lived in an English-style house of two stories with glass windows just beyond the village.
Jenny walked a last mile on shoes Severin had filled with leaves for her when the soles began to wear through, trailed by smiling Mohawk children who dropped back when she reached the very English picket fence. She felt a sense of unreality when she saw the neat little house—in its sun-dappled glade, like something from a fairy tale, where a witch or an ogre might live—but she lifted her hand to knock upon the batten door and her heart rose into her throat when it was opened.
The man was the very picture of Severin, as he might look in twenty years. He was dressed much as her lover had been when last she saw him—in buckskin breeches and a simple cotton shirt—but most of his scalp had been plucked clean and only a single hank of glossy black hair, woven with beads, remained. No one would mistake Ashur Rice for an Englishman.
He looked at her curiously and she had not seen a mirror in weeks but she could guess at her appearance. His eyes were as dark, as magnetic as those of his offspring.
“Karekohe,” she said. “Your son. Severin Devere. I have a message from him.”
The man waited expressionlessly for her to go on, and suddenly she wondered if he remembered his English from his time at the Indian School—but that was nonsense because half the village had been able to speak her language well enough to be understood while she had none of theirs.
“He told me to repeat this phrase, that you would know it came from your sister and your brother-in-law.” As she spoke the words, the man’s dark brows rose, and then his lips pursed, and then he burst out laughing.
“And where is this son of mine, that has come back to his father, after all this time?” asked Ashur Rice, in accents every bit as cultivated as Severin’s and entirely at odds with his appearance.
“He was imprisoned by the Americans at Ticonderoga before the fort fell, and I believe that he is now being held by the British and that they are going to hang him.”
The man’s smile faded, like the sun behind a storm cloud.
He nodded and held the door wide for her to enter. And she stood for the first time in weeks in something like the home she had known in New York, comfortably appointed and furnished by someone, at some time in the past, who had cared about it, though the curtains were faded and the cushions had long since lost their plumpness.
“Tell me what has befallen my son,” said this man, after putting food and water in front of Jenny, rummaging through a trunk, and returning with a soft bundle of moose hide that turned out to be a pair of moccasins—brightly sewn with beads and trimmed in velvet and silk—to replace her ruined shoes.
And so she told him. He listened patiently and asked only a few questions. Then he rose and reached for his long rifle. “I will be back,” he said.
“With Severin?”
“With my son,” he agreed.
There was no place for her where he was going. She saw that. She was the reason Severin was in British hands to begin with, and her presence would only jeopardize his safety further. She knew that. But she could not resist a question that had been on her mind since Fort Ti, that she had dared not ask Severin when they were about to be separated, possibly forever.
“Why did you let Thomas Devere take them? Why did you let him take your wife and your sons?”
For a moment, Ashur Rice made no answer. “Perhaps because she was his wife, under English law,” he said at last, “and that he had the disposal of a troop of dragoons to enforce that foreign authority.”
So had John André when he had taken Jenny, but Severin had not let that stand. He had followed her into the wilderness to win her freedom.
“Why didn’t you go after them?”
“Thomas Devere wanted Julian, my eldest boy, because he thought that Julian was his, but he took Severin too, as leverage. Understand, he did not want him. But he took him, and promised to kill him if I followed. There was much killing then, as now, on the border. The death of one little half-Indian boy would have gone unremarked among all the butchery. To Thomas Devere, Severin was nothing. To the English, he was nothing. But that boy was my son. Better that he should live among the English than die among the Mohawk.”
Ashur Rice had given up his son so that Severin would have a chance, at least, to live. Sent him away as Severin had sent Jenny away from Ticonderoga. “It has to be different this time,” she said.
Ashur Rice flashed her a sly smile, much like his son’s. “The thing about leverage in the borderlands is that it is always changing hands. That day, it belonged to Thomas Devere and the English. Today, at least, it belongs to Burgoyne’s Indian allies, including the Mohawk. I will bring my son home.”
She did not doubt him. The American prodigal indeed.
* * *
They returned the next morning: in a large party of men of fierce appearance with paint on their faces, armed for war. A small child came to fetch Jenny to the village to see this wonder, the return of Kanonsase’s son.
Severin looked thin, but he was smiling. And, she realized, being mocked in a language he spoke mostly fluently but with occasio
nal halting pauses while he searched for a word or phrase he no longer remembered.
It seemed the Mohawks did not much like his hair. It made him look like a woman. Other than that Ashur Rice’s son was entirely what everyone expected Ashur Rice’s son to be. There was no time for them to speak privately, but Severin kissed her and assured her that everything was going to be all right—and this time she could rely on that.
“Jack Brag cannot afford to alienate his Indian allies, and my father convinced a fair few warriors to desert his cause if he did not free me. And Gentleman Johnny has other, greater problems now.”
Severin and his father and his father’s friends talked and ate, and Jenny gathered that much of their discussion was about the war and the English. By nightfall most of their guests had left the village. Jenny and Severin retired to Ashur Rice’s house, where there was an unused bedroom, dusty but serviceable, and they washed and tumbled into bed together, free at last.
He told her about Lieutenant Jones and poor, murdered Jane McCrea, and Burgoyne’s splendid table in the wilderness. Vignettes of fairy-tale fancy, and all too real horror.
“What will happen to us?” she asked. “If General Burgoyne takes Albany?”
“Taking Albany is one thing. Holding the wild places, like this, is another. We are safe enough here for now, and I am content to eat and sleep and love you, while Jack Brag tries to hold water in his open hand.”
Jenny was content too. For a week she rested and ate and relished the company of the man she loved, who insisted they be married. “If my parents had married, Thomas Devere would not have been able to twist the law to separate them, to take her away,” he said.
“If we marry, I will never be able to sign a contract without your permission.”
“Then I must always give it,” he said without hesitation.
“And if you don’t like the terms or the theater, or the theater manager?”
“Then we will discuss my objections and try to come to a decision together. As we should do everything. But in the end, you will choose your course, Jenny. Always.”
He would not take no for an answer, and she found she did not want him to. She relented in the first week of September, though it took two more weeks to find a preacher to perform the ceremony. Jenny only wished Aunt Frances could have been there.
By that time news had reached them that General Burgoyne was on the point of surrender at a place called Saratoga. Among other things, lurid accounts of Indian atrocities—the horrible, damning story of Jane McCrea—had robbed Jack Brag of a good deal of his expected Tory support and bolstered Rebel enlistments.
“It means we can go south,” said Severin.
“To where?”
“Boston.”
“There are no playhouses in Boston.”
“No, but there are presses, and you have been scribbling away for months now. Unless you expect me to write out a thousand copies of this masterwork by hand, we should go to Boston.”
They traveled south and spent the winter in Boston, which Jenny did not much like, but where she put her newest work to press. By then General Howe had been driven from Philadelphia, and they continued on to the City of Brotherly Love, where there were not only presses but also a theater.
A letter reached her there, addressed to “Miss Leighton” but intended, she quickly realized on breaking the seal, for her aunt.
“It is gibberish,” said Jenny, passing it to her husband, who was by now used to being given vast texts and tracts to read, sometimes in the middle of the night, and expected to offer considered opinions and constructive comments.
“It is a book cipher,” Severin explained, unable to conceal his interest. “A code keyed to a work both sender and recipient own a copy of, or know by heart. Can you think of any text your aunt always carried with her?”
It took a week to track down a copy of Rowe’s Fair Penitent in Philadelphia, and another day for Severin to work the code and decipher the letter.
“Angela Ferrers is dead,” he said.
“How?” asked Jenny, surprised to find herself grieving for her aunt’s remarkable, dangerous friend.
“André,” replied her husband. “At Howe’s bidding.” Severin wished John André joy serving his old masters. The Widow had been an original. They would not see her like again. “He tracked her down in Philadelphia. The writer has taken up her network, but is obviously unaware of your aunt’s fate. From the hand, I judge your correspondent to be a woman. From the questions she asks, I surmise she has assumed the Widow’s mantle. It is up to you whether we reply.”
Jenny considered for a day and then decided to respond. She could not bring Aunt Frances back, but she could honor her memory by taking her place in the Widow’s network. Severin—reasonably or not—felt he owed something to the American cause, to his countrymen, and perhaps this was a way to do his part, without the old “necessities” of skulduggery and violence.
And so she dictated a brief account of her aunt’s death, and Severin added intelligence from their travels and then put the message into cipher. After that, a new letter came every other week, and as Jenny had resumed her profession, so Severin resumed his, in the service of the country of his birth. With the freedom now to determine his own limits as to the shape that service might take.
They discovered that Courtney Fairchild had been sent home by Howe to prevent his dueling with Captain André. And that Bobby Hallam had fled New York for Jamaica when Fairchild learned of his part in Frances Leighton’s death.
When the Southwark Theater in Philadelphia reopened, Severin expressed no objections to Jenny’s performing. And when New York was liberated at last, and for good and all, they returned there and bought a very fine house near the Battery. For many years a carriage called at that address three nights a week to take the John Street’s leading lady, Mrs. Devere, an actress and playwright who was a great favorite of President Washington, to the theater. She shared the carriage with her husband: a darkly handsome man, even in later life, who—it was subsequently remembered—never missed a single performance.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Jennifer Leighton is a creature of fiction, but the American writer Mercy Otis Warren did earn herself a place on a British hanging list with her pamphlet plays The Blockheads and The Adulateur. The obstacles faced by ambitious Georgian actresses and women of letters in the period were formidable, and the theater was a politically charged arena on both sides of the Atlantic. Frances Leighton is modeled on early feminist actress, playwright, novelist, and poet Mary Robinson, a onetime royal mistress who later became Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s paramour when he returned home after the war.
The Georgian theater played a leading role in the American Revolution that today has largely been forgotten. Playhouses thrived before the war in Philadelphia, New York, and Williamsburg, college students staged amateur theatricals in their dormitories, and British and American forces acted plays in their camps throughout the conflict. The rhetoric of patriots like Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale owed much to Addison’s Cato the Censor—reportedly one of Washington’s favorite plays, which his officers performed at Valley Forge despite Congress’s ban on the theater.
John Burgoyne is not recorded to have been in New York in 1775–1776, but apart from the fictive diversion of the Boyne, the timeline in all other ways follows his path to defeat at Saratoga.
RECOMMENDED READING
Bailyn, Bernard. Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Bakeless, John. Turncoats, Traitors & Heroes. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Ballaster, Ros. “Rivals for the Repertory: Theatre and Novel in Georgian London,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 27, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 5–24.
Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence. N
ew York: Knopf, 2005.
Brown, Jared. The Theatre in America During the Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson. New York: Random House, 2005.
Countryman, Edward. A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790. New York: Norton, 1989.
Hatch, Robert McConnell. Major John André: A Gallant in Spy’s Clothing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986.
Hibbert, Christopher. Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes. New York: Norton, 2002.
Ireland, Joseph N. Records of the New York Stage, from 1750 to 1860. New York: T. H. Morrell, 1866.
Johnson, Odai. Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Johnson, Odai. The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
Ketchum, Richard M. Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
Ketchum, Richard M. Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Nathans, Heather S. Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
O’Shaughnessy, Andrew. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Russell, Gillian. Women, Sociability, and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Schecter, Barnet. The Battle for New York. London: Pimlico, 2002.
Shaffer, Jason. Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Stuart, Nancy Rubin. The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008.
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